


a wolf at your door for dinner

by willowoftheriver



Series: this town will eventually take me [3]
Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games), Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alliances, Alpha Bane, Alpha Bruce Wayne, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Arkham Asylum, Canon Blending, Canon-Typical Violence, Codependency, Depression, F/M, Frenemies, Gotham City - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, Hypocrisy, John Blake and the Joker are related, Joker (DCU) Has Issues, M/M, Minor Character Death, Movie: The Dark Knight (2008), Movie: The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Multi, Obsession, Omega Harley Quinn, Omega John Blake, Omega Joker (DCU), Omega Oswald Cobblepot, Omega Verse, Parent-Child Relationship, Revenge, Scarecrow's Fear Toxin (DCU), Vendettas, sanity slippage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:33:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22758592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: Bane broke the Bat. He never expected the consequences.
Relationships: Bane (DCU)/John Blake, Harley Quinn/Thomas Schiff, Joker (DCU) & Alfred Pennyworth, Joker (DCU)/Bruce Wayne, Oswald Cobblepot & Joker (DCU), Oswald Cobblepot/Jim Gordon, Oswald Cobblepot/Victor Zsasz
Series: this town will eventually take me [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1612429
Comments: 22
Kudos: 116





	1. i'm laughing, i'm crying (it feels like i'm dying)

Wayne Manor, Bane has learned, was first constructed in 1837, decades prior to the founding of Wayne Enterprises, by one Judge Solomon Wayne as a wedding present to his omega, who had supposedly drawn up the blueprints of it himself, long before it was legal in this country for omegas to have any higher education at all, much less in a field like architecture. From then on, it had been expanded, remodeled, burned down and rebuilt, always standing there at the edge of the city as a reminder of nothing but decay and division, the extravagance of the rich looming over the impoverished, the desperate.

Now it seems naught but a mausoleum, a testament to a bloodline and a city soon to be burned to ashes. A butler stands in the foyer amongst things he doesn’t own, but instead of celebrate his own emancipation, he pulls his master’s children tighter to himself, glares hatred and malice at Bane and his men.

Bane had, honestly, expected to find Wayne’s omega here as well—mourning and weeping the loss of his alpha, rendering the butler wholly unnecessary as he tugged the last remnants of his mate to his breast. Yet on the other hand, the mother of Bruce Wayne’s children has always been _reclusive_ , at best—not a single magazine has ever gotten his picture before or after Wayne had retreated into a self-imposed near exile no commentator has once been able to guess the reason for.

“No need for worry,” Bane says as Pennyworth backs up until his shoulder blades are digging into the stone wall boxing him in, the knuckles of his veiny hands white where he grips them protectively across the two eldest children’s chests. “We don’t hurt old men and little boys.” He turns to Barsad, gives a leisurely nod of his head. “Search the property, make sure no one else is here. Salvage what you can. Burn the rest.”

Ra’s al Ghul had burned this house, nearly a decade ago, as recompense. Perhaps in part for the havoc Wayne had wreaked at the League’s headquarters—but more for his unwillingness to cooperate, Bane suspects. He knew Ra’s once, after all, and quite well.

Bane isn’t nearly so petty. Bruce Wayne is where he belongs, learning the only lesson his idealism ever could’ve earned him, and as for his family—Bane never has been one to believe that the sins of the father should be paid by the sons.

But this _house_. The hubris in its every line, the decadence in the wealth it took to bring it to existence, maintain it as the city it looked upon fell to neglected ruin.

The fire that will cleanse it will simply be a prelude. The first cut to lance the infected, festering wound.

“Master Jerome,” Pennyworth hisses, as one of the two identical alpha boys squirms out of his hold. He simply bares his teeth up at him in response, disrespectful.

“Should not the boy’s mother be here to care for him, at such a time? Should he not be here mourning his alpha?”

Pennyworth gives a long bark of laughter. (Bane isn’t sure what he said that was so funny.)

“I think you’ll soon find that he is. In his own way.”

The youngest child— _Bruce_ , and Bane has thought before how odd it is for the omega child to be the one named for the alpha sire—hides his face in Pennyworth’s side when the men return to the foyer, reaches out futilely for Jerome.

“No one else around,” Barsad reports, and takes a breath to continue.

But then a gunshot rings out and one of their brothers collapses dead to the ground, half his skull blown away. They all whirl to where it came from, the next shot going fortunately wide—though the third ricochets off of the very edge of Bane’s mask, concerningly close to vulnerable flesh and wiring.

A shot from Barsad rings out then, but Bane wraps his hand around the muzzle of his rifle before he can go for the kill. The boy’s eyes are wide with shock as it is, the gun dropped forgotten to the floor as he raises a hand to try to staunch the blood gushing from his arm.

“ _Jerome!”_ Pennyworth shouts, lurching forward to drag him back into his grasp. (Bruce wails.)

“You stupid boy, you _stupid_ —”

“Dad’s afraid of guns,” Jerome mutters, and actually begins to _giggle_. “But I’m not—”

It’s actually a . . . disconcerting sight, if Bane were being honest with himself. A boy just turned eight, raised with all the trappings of civilization and comfort absent in the Pit, working himself into something very nearly like a _cackle_ even as tears of pain run down his face, the body of the man whose life he took cooling on the marble floor ten feet away.

The identical child, Jeremiah, turns blank eyes up to Bane. “I guess you do hurt little boys.”

.

(This is the first unexpected thing that happens to Bane in Gotham City.)

.

Mommy does cry. Bruce knows most people probably wouldn’t notice, but he does.

Mommy laughs and laughs and laughs and _laughs_ , standing there as his boys all watch, unmoving, unspeaking. Even Alfred’s lips are pressed together in a thin little line, stony and unblinking as he props Bruce up on his hip and tries to keep his eyes tucked into his side.

Bruce thinks they’re all probably scared. After all, one of the boys had just done something really stupid—he’d asked Mommy why he was so upset that Bane broke the Bat. ‘Cause now, the city was all theirs, nobody left to interfere with them.

So Mommy shot him in both his kneecaps and slit his throat from ear to ear, because the city wasn’t worth having if the Batman wasn’t in it. And all the while he laughed like he couldn’t stop, even if he tried.

He’s not wearing his makeup today, so there aren’t any tracks on his face or anything, but Bruce can see that his eyes are red, and a little puffy, and there’s maybe even some dampness in his lashes catching the ugly yellow streetlights.

And he laughs until his hands have found their way to his head and he’s pulling his own hair. Until he’s gasping for air, until he can’t breathe.

Until it all nearly sounds like a scream.

.

(For a minute, Bruce is terrified Mommy’ll ~~die~~ go away, just like Bane made Daddy go away, too.

He doesn’t, but it doesn’t make Bruce any less afraid.)

.

Cobblepot’s holed up in some shitty little warehouse down by the docks, because his clubs have had Molotovs thrown through the front windows and his house has been so thoroughly looted to hell and back that his furs and waistcoats are probably now lining the boxes of some of the bums sleeping in the vicinity of the bridge Joker’s family is huddled under for the time being.

There’s no court for the little Penguin to hold anymore, though he has some of his permanent retainers still clustered around him—Zsasz, of course, who looks less amused than usual, and even more eager to kill something, just itching to put another mark or ten or twenty or a hundred in his skin. The Zsaszettes behind him, bored, not nearly as pretty when they don’t have access to vast amounts of makeup and hair spray. The oldest of Penguin’s brats, the mute adopted one, whatever his name is. And the younger, the ones he spread his legs and pushed out for the Commissioner—all of them together in a protective little unit in a corner, the only girl glaring resentment at anyone who’ll look at her.

“ _Hiiiii_ ,” Joker opens with, rather than say, shooting somebody in the stomach.

Zsasz still has an assault rifle trained on his head before he even finishes the word.

“What the fuck?!” Cobblepot shrieks—he always has been a bit of a shrew—and pulls his own piece out of his belt, waving it unsteadily in Joker’s face. “How did you get in here?”

Well, okay. Maybe Joker did shoot _a few_ guys in the stomach. But he drops his gun, expensive silencer and all, and holds his hands up placatingly by his head.

“Now, don’t be, uh, has _ty_ , Ozzie. Can I call you Ozzie?”

“No!”

“I think we could both benefit from a, hmm, _talk_. That’s all I wanna do.”

“As if anyone in this city has ever benefited from _you_ , freak!”

That really is _funny_ , to be called a freak by _Penguin_.

Unfortunately, Joker doesn’t really feel like laughing anymore. It all just kind of went out of him at once, left him there on the ground with his lungs locked up and his teeth creaking against each other in a frozen grin, threatening to snap off at his gums.

So he reaches out and snatches that gun out of Cobblepot’s hands before even Zsasz can react, his knife up and slipping past soft little omega lips to press into the tender membrane lining the inside of his cheeks.

“You and your whole operation are only still here because I’ve allowed it. And it’ll all end when I decide it.”

Cobblepot hits him with his cane, a surprising amount of force behind it. He’ll bruise bad on that side tomorrow, so he digs his blade in, a nasty slice to the interior of Cobblepot’s mouth that gushes blood. It probably won’t scar, though, and Zsasz only shoots the knife out of his hand as he backpedals away.

“But Bane—oh, oh, Bane seems to have decided to go around pissing me off _personally_ in every way he can. Look at what he did to my boy!”

Jerome and Jeremiah have trailed him to the doorway of the office, the former sweaty and trembling as he presses his hand as hard as he can to his tightly bound bullet wound. Jeeves had been in the army at some point, had some first aid experience, but there wasn’t much he could do with the supplies available. (And Joker can only hope, like he’s never hoped before, that he won’t lose the first child his Batsy ever gave him to a fucking _infection_.)

Cobblepot spits blood, raises a ratty silk handkerchief to his mouth as he narrows his eyes at the twins. Jerome swoons a little into his brother’s side, maybe for the dramatic effect—or then again, maybe not—though Jeremiah simply looks at him in vague disgust. “Are those—did you kidnap Bruce Wayne’s kids?”

“No, no, no. They’re _my_ kids, birdy. And I brought them here to show you—we’re on the same footing. Just two little omegas, both of us. Mothers. All alone. He’s got your alpha in the sewers and mine, well—he’s in a hole in somewhere like Kazakhstan at the moment. I don’t even know where the fuck that is!”

The wheels are turning in Cobblepot’s head, fast enough to catch fire. It only takes a half second for his eyes to widen with the realization—though, honestly, Joker has to hand it to the Bat. The shallow, happy, _stupid_ air he so convincingly draws around himself for every camera has proved so very effective at killing in their cradle the thoughts of anyone who might begin to connect the pieces. _Such an idiot just_ couldn’t . . .

“And now,” Joker says, before Cobblepot can give any voice to his conclusions, “now, he’s going to stage a little _break_ out at Arkham. And that—that _offends_ me, Penguin. Blackgate—he can have that. I mean, it was your alpha’s little law that got most of the guys stuck in there, anyway.”

Cobblepot actually _snarls_. It’s cute. “I told Jim—I—Dent was scum! Not even the Batman—not even _Wayne_ should’ve taken the blame for that!”

Yeah, sure, Dent was scum, as is everyone, with the sole exception of the Bat himself and his one holy rule. (Irony in that, to be sure.) Cobblepot’s ignoring that he has a bigger body count than Dent, that it isn’t even comparable, but then again, he probably blames the incident with poor old Harv for why Jim Jr. has a habit of killing family pets and, more recently, has taken an acute interest in making the hookers in the Narrows bleed. (He hasn’t killed one. Yet.)

“But Arkham’s _mine_. And he thinks he can just rip it apart, tear it to the ground—? Those are _my_ guys in there. Even Harley’s there, and he thinks he’s gonna do something for them I _can’t_? Oh. Oh no.”

“You, of anyone, _would_ get territorial over an insane asylum.”

“Over an island. Not a particularly small one, either. What a—” He flicks his eyes around the dinky industrial office, with its shitty metal desk and off-color florescent lights. “—base of operations it could be. Or are you planning to just cower here like a rat in your gutter until Bane gets around to finally leveling the city?”

“I would’ve thought you’d like all this—the, the anarchy, the _chaos_. I thought that was all you wanted for Gotham! Did one measly little broken bat ruin all the enjoyment for you? Or are you just jealous it wasn’t you who caused it?”

Joker thinks, briefly, of all the ways he’s going to destroy—going to _break_ —Penguin if they both live to see the end of this. Thinks a bit longer of doing something much more _immediate_ , like sticking a knife in a nonlethal part of his belly and _twisting_ —

“He’s going about it _allllll_ wrong. Motivation’s every bit as important as results, and his motive is, uh, _lack_ ing. Mainly because he has one at all. What kind of true chaos can come out of _that_? No, Bane’s a _schemer_. And the thing about schemes? About motives? It’s so easy to ruin ‘em.”

“What, exactly, is it you’re proposing?”

“Hmm, well, they’ve got their little league. ‘The League of Shadows’, ooh, terrifying. I think we should make our own. The League of Widows, maybe—or the-soon-to-be-widowed, at any rate. He’s gearing up to kill Jimbo as we speak.”

One of Cobblepot’s hands finds its way up to his neck, seemingly without his notice, to cover the white scar peeking over the top of his fraying shirt. They say that a bonding mark will hurt, if an alpha predeceases their omega—hurt like not much else can ever scratch the surface of.

(Of course, the way Zsasz sometimes glances at him out of the corner of his eye, he’d probably just _jump_ to fill that void, get his teeth as wet as his dick.)

“But with your manpower and my, ah, _initiative_ , I think we could make it so Bane has a long, slow, p _ain_ ful realization that Gotham doesn’t belong to _him_.”

Cobblepot laughs, swings his gaze to Zsasz, who cracks an obedient toothy smile, and his adopted kid, who doesn’t. “The Clown _really_ thinks he can take on a guy who has a cult and a nuclear bomb. And—” His one-eyed focus flits back to Joker. “—you’d have enough manpower yourself if you didn’t go through your boys like used Kleenex.”

As though Cobblepot only refrains from doing the same out of anything other than the pure economics of it. It’s all about the _money_ for him, and that makes him _limited_.

Joker tries to smile, or smirk, but he can’t quite manage it. It reminds him of when he was much younger, and his only emotional state always felt like old, peeling paint.

“You can die here,” he says instead, wiggling his fingers at the surroundings. “As, uh, nothing. Not anymore than you started as. Just think, all the sacrifices you’ve made on the way to the top, and Bane’s gonna nuke you out of existence because he thinks that makes you _scum_. But, if you don’t have a problem with that . . .”

.

The court is in its infancy—they haven’t even decided on a judge yet—when the omegas arrive, one of them slinking through the crowd, footsteps almost a dance; the other announcing his arrival with the echoing strike of a cane against the floor with every plodding step he takes.

He recognizes Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot ( _Gordon_ ) from that alone, before he even makes it into his line of sight. The Commissioner’s hypocrisy, limping around as a living, breathing being. It is, actually, a satisfying thing to behold.

But he hangs back, a retreating ghost of his former grandeur with his wrinkled clothes and oily, unwashed hair hanging unstyled around his face. The bags smudged under his eyes speak of weeks of little sleep. He doesn’t acknowledge Bane—doesn’t say anything at all, just flicks his gaze to his companion and lets it rest there, anxious, energetic. Perhaps angry.

Bane doesn’t recognize the other omega, at first. There’s something about him that rings familiar, yes—but in his disheveled, colorless clothes, unkempt blonde hair obscuring his face, all Bane can think is that he seems a pale imitation of his little bird, a bit less delicate. Yet enough so that he would’ve been fought over in the Pit, _killed_ for.

Then he cants his head up and smiles, wide and disingenuous and gruesome. The scars on his face are only slightly rougher than those on his neck, atop his bonding gland, and as he oozes a mingled smell—half his own, half amalgamated with one Bane is already _well_ acquainted with—he understands.

“I’ve come to give you a tiny little _opportunity_ ,” he says, meeting Bane's eyes. (His are green, and bloodshot.) He approaches him with a few big, bold steps, stopping close enough that warm breath tickles the exposed part of his face. “You can do what the Bat was never able to. Right here, right now. Kill me.”

“Bruce Wayne’s omega,” he rumbles, terribly amused. Then he turns to his followers, laughs jovially. “Look at the both of them. The purest expression of their alphas’ corruption.”

“Wrap your hands around my throat,” he hisses, his own hands finding their way there, nails digging superficially into flesh. “Break me, like you broke the Bat.”

“Oswald Cobblepot—Commissioner Gordon fights organized crime, but not when it’s in his own bed. Not when the hands dripping with so _much_ blood are those of the one he’s taken to mate. And the _Batman_ —”

So this is the omega Wayne had soundly denied Talia to remain faithful to. She’d written it off as being due to her beta status, but Bane had still been able to see how much it bothered her. Her rage is always beautiful, cold enough to scald, to peel skin from bone.

“—the Batman props himself up as a defender of Gotham, willing to do what the police won’t. Yet before us—the omega he had mother his own children, the same omega who held the city in a reign of terror—”

“ _Fore_ play,” he drawls, smacking his lips and licking his scars. “An omega’s gotta get his alpha’s attention _somehow_ —”

“A _rabid dog_ he has continually failed to leash, for eight years—”

“Aww, I think I’ve been a pretty _good boy_ these past few years. A real kept omega. Most of the time.”

“Like Gordon, he only deigns to defend Gotham from those disassociated from himself, from those he _arbitrarily_ decides are worth stopping!”

“Y’know,” Joker interrupts yet again, widening his smile as it tracks around the room, lands briefly on the little bird before flitting back to Bane. (The smile slips away as he looks at him.) “Batsy told me about Ra’s al Ghul and his little ninja club. Very . . . old world. Very Hammurabi. An eye for an eye—a house for a house. But you came into _my_ _city_. Took my alpha. Took what _completed me_ , and left me . . . this. So what should I do with, uh, you? What d’ya think old Ra’s would’ve taken from you, to get his . . . satisfaction?”

Bane laughs again, turning his back to him. It’s fitting for him to be there—mutilated, ruined, like his dying city and his dying alpha. All the while the little bird lingers in his peripheral vision, a counterpoint of youth and wholeness and vitality, there on his knees in forced submission.

“You cannot hurt an idea, Rabid Dog.”

Joker blinks. Clicks his tongue. Throws his hands up and shrugs. “Okay then.”

“Your time will come, of course—for the both of you to answer for your crimes. To feel the _fire_ , just as your alphas have. But not today. Not so soon.”

Joker flounces over to Cobblepot, slings an arm around his shoulders and rests their heads together at the temples. Cobblepot makes an abortive movement to elbow him in the side. “Uh-huh. When _eeeever_ you’re ready. And don’t worry—you’ll know just where to find us, Ozzie and me.”

He makes to fist his fingers in Cobblepot’s sleeve and drag him away, but loosens his grip in the next instant, snaps his head back up in Bane’s direction. “Oh yeah, did I ever tell ya how I got these scars?”

“As we’ve never spoken before today, I can confidently say you haven’t.”

“Oh. Oh. Well, ah, maybe one day. And you can tell me how you got that mask.”

He slinks backwards, trailing tips of fingers down Cobblepot’s neck until he’s out of reach, and it’s almost a laugh that comes out of his mouth. But not quite.

.

(This is the second unexpected thing that happens to Bane in Gotham City.)

.

“I think—yep, this is it. How could I ever forget?”

Mommy does a slow twirl in the middle of the—is this a _living room_?—nearly tripping over his own feet. He kicks a needle off into the kitchen somewhere, and Bruce’s really not sure why there are so many of them laying around. Spoons, too.

“You’ve led us around the Narrows all evening looking for _this_?” Alfred demands, pulling Bruce a little higher on his hip.

“You know what they say, Jeeves—in times of crisis, omegas seek out the _fa_ mili _ar_. What could be more familiar than my childhood home?” He throws himself down on a . . . Bruce assumes it’s a couch, as it has the same shape of all the couches (that used to be) at home, but it’s so . . . _filthy_. “It’s barely even changed. The squatters and the junkies have taken gr _eat_ care of it since Mom died. Most of our furniture’s still here and everything, after all this time. Smells a little worse, though.”

Jeremiah scowls, crossing his arms over his chest. “Can we get something to eat now?”

“We’re all gonna go loot tomorrow. Might take a while to find a place that hasn’t been cleared out, but we’ll get something.”

“I’m hungry _now_ ,” he says in disbelief. Bruce’s hungry, too, _starving_ , and not once in his life has he ever felt that way with no promise of a meal dangling in front of him to fix it.

“W _ell_ ,” Mommy says, with a vaguely annoyed air he sometimes gets with Alfred, but almost never with them or Daddy, “there’s probably still a dumpster out back. Used to be you could find some tasty stuff in there sometimes. Feel free to go look.”

Jeremiah makes a choked sound. Mommy takes a deep breath and runs his hands down his face, pressing his fingers into his eyes so hard that Bruce can’t help but wince.

“I’m turning into my mother,” he mutters, barely loud enough to be heard. “Let’s just—let’s just all get some sleep. It’s gonna be a . . . big day tomorrow. Jerome. You doing okay? Still gettin’ along?”

Jerome goes over to him, kind of collapses into his side. “Hurts,” he grits out.

“We’ll hit a pharmacy and get you some Oxy or something tomorrow.”

“I don’t know what that is,” he moans.

Mommy runs a jittery hand through his hair, pats him on the head. Then he heaves himself up, pressing Jerome to his side. “You can have the couch _alllll_ to yourself tonight, Jeeves. Me and the kids’ll take the bed. If it’s still there.”

“How generous of you,” Alfred says, though Bruce thinks he doesn’t actually seem like he means it. He hands Bruce over, reluctantly, into Mommy’s arms, who carries him against his chest with both of his hands under his thighs. Jeremiah trails a few paces behind them on the short trip into the next room, where Mommy falls onto the sagging bed sitting in the middle of it. (It’s the hardest mattress Bruce has ever felt.)

“I wasn’t allowed to sleep in here as a kid,” says Mommy, motionless and staring at the ceiling as Jerome and Jeremiah both cuddle up around him. Each one of them extends an arm over Bruce, and for once they’re too tired to try to push each other away from him.

“This was your Mom’s room?” Jeremiah asks.

“Yeah. And I killed her right here, on this bed.”

Bruce’s eyes widen, because although he doesn’t _entirely_ comprehend everything that means, there’s a feeling that creeps up over him—something _squirming_ that surrounds him on all sides, that makes him want nothing more than to get up from this—this _thing_ he’s lying on, that seems to be smothering him and making him dirty.

But Mommy and Jerome and Jeremiah’s arms are tight around him, holding him in place.

“Daddy should be here,” comes out of his mouth involuntarily, because it’s the only part of him that can move. “Why—?” He bites his lip then, hard enough to draw blood, and blinks back his tears. Daddy would want him to be strong right now, not—not this.

“Why?” Mommy smooths Bruce’s wavy hair back with two fingers, traces them down between his eyes to his nose. “Because for all that he wants to be seen as the omniscient Bat of Justice—lurking in every shadow—he’s just a man. And it’s so easy to break a man. Easier than anything.”

When the twins try to ask more questions, he shushes them, closes their eyelids with his hands.

“ _Hush, little babies,”_ he sings. His voice isn’t very nice. “— _don’t say a word. Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. If that mockingbird don’t sing, Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. If that diamond ring don’t glint, Daddy’s gonna get sent off to the Pit. If Bane thinks he owns this town, Mommy’s gonna hafta burn the whole thing down. And if the Bat never comes back—”_

Something in his voice, in the next few words, reminds Bruce of a knife or a gun, as it makes someone bleed. A few short, painful, deep, wounds.

“ _—Mommy’s. Gonna. Hafta. Make. Bane. Pay. For. That._ ”

.

The third unexpected thing that happens to Bane in Gotham City is this:

He takes off his mask. And someone doesn’t flinch away.

Someone cares about who he is underneath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiiiiiii. So The Dark Knight Rises is definitely my least favorite of the Nolan movies. That's not to say it's not still a pretty good movie in its own right, but I just had some issues with how it ended the whole series. But, I'm nevertheless a whore for Bane/Blake, which will hopefully get a bit more fleshed out in the next chapter.
> 
> I think even strictly in canon, Joker could've (and would've) steamrolled Bane. But since this is off in omegaverse fanfiction territory, it gets to be even more fun.
> 
> Yes, Bruce Junior in this is basically Bruce from Gotham, and I expect he and the twins will have an . . . interesting relationship in their adulthood.
> 
> The Joker really needs to appreciate Penguin more. And I love Oswald, so spoiler, Joker's definitely not going to fuck him up after Bane's gone, whatever he thinks now lol.
> 
> This is largely rooted in the Nolan canon, though obviously there's some elements from Gotham cherrypicked, and a lot of what's going to be involved about Arkham will come from the Arkham games. And Harley will definitely be the Margot Robbie version when she finally gets around to appearing.
> 
> The Joker and John Blake being brothers is a theory I've always really liked and actually wrote a really short fic about years ago, so here we go again.
> 
> Gobblepot is still my Gotham otp, though I've also developed a fondness for Zsaszlepot, so gotta get those vibes in.
> 
> (Honestly I'm having too much fun with this, somebody stop me before I hurt myself.)
> 
> Story title comes from the song "The Wolf" by Phildel, and the chapter title is from "Pity Party" from Melanie Martinez.
> 
> Thanks for the kudos and comments on the previous parts of the series!!
> 
> -Anna


	2. sail with me into the dark

It took a while, and some walking, and a few bullets—only a couple of them in potentially lethal spots, because Jeeves insisted he _‘think of the children’_ —but they did find a place that still had some food, and another with some medicine. Now Jerome is incognizant on the couch, off in a happy daze of antibiotics and Oxy, while Jeeves and Jeremiah and Bruce stuff their faces with prepackaged, nutritionally devoid—but oh so satisfying—shit, saving the canned stuff for later.

Maybe Joker’s become accustomed to it, these past eight years—having food in immediate reach, beyond concern. But whatever the reason, he doesn’t grab for it, gouge at it, like he would’ve in the points of his childhood when the black, all-consuming, leaden pressure in his head hadn’t been pressing incessantly down, rendering everything numb, even the most basic of his bodily functions. (Though those had become increasingly common, as time went on, as organs stopped mattering, and breathing stopped mattering.) He hasn’t eaten in days, but he’s not hungry.

Instead he goes into the apartment’s one bathroom, a plastic bag clenched in his hand. The room is even filthier now than it is in those shaky, foggy memories of his, and it looks like someone popped a vein as they shot up, old dried blood crusted over the floor and walls.

The mirror above the scummy sink is broken, radiating in a circle out from the middle. Someone must’ve lost their little temper and only succeeded in cutting their knuckles open on the glass. Joker stares into it, uses it to guide his hand as he spreads the green dye along the part of his hair and brushes it outwards into the rest. Eventually he gives up the methodical approach and squirts it all across his scalp, shaking his head like a wet dog to spread it. Green drops splatter off in every direction, congealing into a dark brown mess where it meets the blood.

The stains on his fingers are soon covered by the greasepaint, thick white slathered across his face, then the black circles around his eyes. He presses his nails into the lids, so hard he can nearly feel the eyeballs _bend_ , and tries to smile. Smirk. Twitch his fucking lips and pull them up in a grimace. Anything.

(“You should brush your teeth more than once every twenty years,” his Bats had once told him in disgust, a very long time ago. And so Joker had eventually started to—most mornings, in that palatial master bathroom as Bats went about his own routine beside him.)

The tears fuck up the paint, seeping black down in sloppy tracks through the white. But he just goes for the red, scratching it across his lips and snagging his nails in scar tissue, forcing them up at the edges.

It falls flat the second he lets go. But his feet, constrained in his expensive scuffed shoes—his toes clench. Something twitches in his ankles. Then they grind in their sockets as he rotates them out and his feet begin to move, a long, slow drag of one after the other through the filth on the floor. His arms contort in ways he can’t quite control, to the sound of music he can only just barely hear. It seems to wrap around him in increments, discordant notes that tighten across his chest, pushing so much pressure against his ribs that they threaten to crack, cave in on his lungs and pop his heart in its sac.

He has terrible, biting little memories of this room, and the one next to it where his kids are eating, and the one next to that, and even the hallway outside and the street down below. But that pain—that screaming, clawing, vicious, _vulnerable_ discomfort—now, only now, he craves it, so many years after he left it all behind. Stepped out and away from it, decided to find nothing but the _humor_ in it.

It makes the pit of rage in his chest that much deeper. That much darker.

And finally— _finally_ , after his feet still and his hands fall like weights to the lip of the sink, he’s able to look at the innumerable reflections of his face twisting around each shattered fragment of the mirror and bare his yellowed—but clean, so very clean—teeth.

.

Penguin is sucking on what must be the last cigar left in Gotham.

“Aww,” says Joker in greeting. “And here I was gonna ask you for a cigarette.”

“I’m giving you enough,” Cobblepot sneers, blowing smoke in his general direction. Joker wonders if it’s a habit he picked up from Maroni Senior all those years back when he was fucking him. (It’s certainly not something a _proper_ little omega should be seen doing.)

Jeeves wanders past them both, and for a moment he even seems to almost forget little Brucie and the twins and all the constant fawning care he gives to them in favor of eyeing the assortment of heavy weaponry laid out in front of him, stretching from one side of the warehouse to the other.

“How many countries were you selling to?” he asks. Something in his voice seems to be battling an appreciative _glee_. (It makes Joker run his tongue hard over the front of his teeth.)

“I would think the Bat would already have some kind of estimate?” Zsasz ventures, practically molesting the pieces of some kind of particularly large assault rifle as he assembles it. (Joker’s not sure of the exact type—oh, he appreciates guns well enough, only a little less than he appreciates knives and explosives, but he can’t say he knows all the technical terms for them in excessive, pointless detail, the way Zsasz and Jeeves seem to and be jerking themselves over.)

“If he’s as thorough as he leads on,” Zsasz adds.

“The _Bat_ ,” Penguin scoffs.

Joker doesn’t look at him, though something in his knuckles contracts, tight enough that Jerome and Jeremiah squirm where he grips their shoulders.

“Poor little rich boy. I still remember when that happened, the mugging. Fish and her boys all thought it was really funny. You probably don’t know who Fish was, do you? Too young for it. Were you even alive when it happened?”

Joker isn’t honestly sure. And he’s wondered before.

“The guys read all the details in the paper. You know, they say that the woman died instantly, but Thomas Wayne? It might’ve taken him thirty seconds or so to follow her. All that money, all that power, but in the end, he could only just lie there on that filthy concrete bleeding his life away like any Narrows rat.” He smiles, self-satisfied and nearly as wide as Joker once could manage.

Joker doesn’t push his sons on over to Alfred, because he thinks this is an important lesson—that when it came down to it, Grandpa Thomas’s bleeding heart philanthropy didn’t count for anything. “No sympathy at all for the man who deigned to share a teensy tiny bit of his billions with us poor old trash?”

“I’m not the first Cobblepot in Gotham.”

“Yeeaaah. I heard about your, er, _Mom_. And all that.”

Penguin grits his teeth. “We were here as long as the Waynes. _Rich_ as the Waynes, long before me. But then Solomon— _Solomon_ , the _hanging judge_ , the _pulpit pounder_ —got it into his head that Henry Cobblepot murdered his omega. Some—some dispute over land development, with that architect whore of his. So he drove us all out. All the way back to Hungary. _Ground us to nothing_. And we were still nothing when Mother and her parents came back during the War— _fled back_ —but I, I _clawed_ my way _up_ , back to where we’d been—”

“Still not as rich as Brucie, though, are you?” Not that Joker gives a shit, but oh, _Penguin_ does.

“The Waynes are _scum_ ,” he hisses. “And Bruce Wayne is the worst of them, holding himself up as a _moral authority_ , when his family legacy is built on the _ruination_ of others. I’m glad he saw Mommy and Daddy die—”

“So am I.”

“—he deserved it, they deserved it, but the _Bat_? He’s still just that little boy, isn’t he? Hitting—what was his name? Chill? Over and over again. It really is a clown for a clown. Fitting. So don’t. Fucking. Underestimate me. _Wayne_.”

Penguin’s cigar breath, tinged with blood, is heavy in Joker’s face by the end. And yeah, Joker’s furious, because he’s the only one allowed to make such a brutal summation of the Bat’s neuroses (oh, he’s going to do such interesting things with Cobblepot’s intestines and ovaries when this is over) but at the same time, no one’s ever called him a _Wayne_ before. And that very nearly puts a smile on his face.

But Gary arrives then, so he doesn’t have time to dwell on it. It disappoints him almost enough to slit his throat.

But he greets him with the same half-terrified, half-respectful “boss” that he always does, in his funny little accent, and that reminds him why he’s always liked him so much in the first place.

“Where’s your outfit?” he asks, because Gary always has had the most surreal _oomph_ when he reeks of court dwarf-jester.

“Where’s yours?”

Almost everyone in the room holds their breath. Even Zsasz raises the fleshy ridge where an eyebrow should be.

But Joker plunks a hand down on the crown of his head, ruffles his hair like he’s as little of a brat as the twins. (It makes him frown and scrunch up that big nose of his.) “That’s to be, ah, seen. You got what I asked?”

Of course he does—he still values his life, even after all these years, which is intricately tied to his competence—and Joker snatches the papers away before he can say anything.

“Speaking of ancient history, birdy, you know they say old Amadeus Arkham still haunts the asylum grounds? He ended his sad little life drooling in a cell there, just like the rest of the crazies.”

He spreads the blueprints out on the nearest table, motioning Jerome and Jeremiah to each hold down a curling side. “The grounds have been built over and expanded a lot since then, but the bones of all those original designs—Cyrus Wayne’s designs—are still decaying away under the surface. Busy omega, wasn’t he, before he was offed.”

“Entry point?” Zsasz demands, all business. Joker has to say, he looks pretty striking, frayed at the edges as his suit is getting—he’s all smooth white skin and teeth and fathomless reptile eyes. He shed all his _whimsy_ like a skin and now he’s just a snake coiled to constrict.

“Oh, why so serious, Zsasza?” he asks, sticking out his bottom lip in a pout.

Zsasz's lips pull up into something that could almost seem sweet, ready to lick Joker's offal. “Just serious about the job, clowny. I’ve been in Arkham enough to see plenty of ways to get out, but how do you intend to get in?”

“Well, see, my sleeves are just _brimming_ with aces. Gary!”

Gary doesn’t quite scurry over, as amusing as that would be. Joker thrusts a folded slip of paper in his face. “Harley,” he says, and turns back to the others. “Gotta have a way to talk to the guys on the inside, and Gary can squeeze into all the really _tight_ holes Arkham has to offer—very convenient!”

“You’re depending on that idiot sidekick of yours for a part of your . . . well, I hesitate to call it a ‘master plan’, at this point.”

“Not _depending_ , birdy. She’s just—oh, how _shall_ I put this to continue the metaphor?— _lubing_ up our entry. It’d be possible without her. Just, ah, more painful.”

Cobblepot shoots him a look of delicately offended disgust, as though he didn’t spend a decent part of his youth taking gangsters’ knots, spreading his legs and degrading himself to claw his way up just _one more tiny little_ _rung_ on that ladder. To get back behind the glittering curtain of high society guarded by Waynes.

“Arkham’s on more guard than usual due to the general . . . circumstances, of course. But they’ll be preparing for a direct assault, just like at Blackgate. Bane’s a _blunt hammer_ , instead of, say, a scalpel. Or even a boxcutter. So we’ll _wiggle_ our way in there.”

“Security systems?” Zsasz asks.

“All WayneTech. Brucie ensured it. Lotta money in that contract, but that’s _nnnot_ why he bid for it.”

“You’ve got a master key, you mean?” Zsasz is raising that nonexistent eyebrow again.

Well. More or less, with the ‘more’ dependent on Strange or his toady Sharp coughing up a few bloody, phlegmy codes. And even Harley could ensure that.

“Lucius Fox over at R&D whispers all kinds of little illegal, ah, _secrets_ into Brucie’s ear. A good vigilante’s gotta have a network. And a part of that network comes together riiiight—” He jabs his pointer finger down on one particular northern fringe of the map. “—here. Dead Man’s Point. If you’re gonna fling yourself to your death to escape the electroshock and hydrotherapy, you’re probably gonna do it here—and your bloated body’ll probably end up floating just east of where we’re headed. You got a boat around here somewhere, Penguin?”

“For how many men?”

“All of them.”

Cobblepot raises his fingers to dig harshly into his temples. “I don’t know, clown, I can’t say I’ve put a lot of resources into building up my _navy_ , but I’ll see what can be arranged.”

“And, uh, keep in mind that Bane was _kind_ enough to free all my saner boys from Blackgate, so don’t forget to factor them in with yours! You’d be surprised how many I’ve got that can’t use the insanity defense.”

“What’s at Dead Man’s Point?” Zsasz cuts in, eyeing the spot on the map. “A weapons cache? A few thousand boxes of bat shaped boomerangs?”

“Oh, so much more than that. But why spoil the surprise?”

Zsasz keeps that unwavering, creaking grin on his face as he leans in a little closer to him. Joker almost expects milky white third eyelids to blink. “I’ve got a spot for you all picked out, you know,” he whispers, breath hot against his face. It smells sugary. “You should be flattered—it’s rare that I preselect.”

“How funny. I’ve actually wondered what it’d do to you if you got a cut with nobody dead along with it—would you lose your little mind completely? Just how wrapped up are you in those, ah, tallies? Or is it all more of just a vanity thing?”

“Oh, my skin’s just _itching_ for you.”

“Now, now. I’m a faithful omega, as much as I like your style. Though you wouldn’t know much about bonds, would you?”

“I’d rather kill you than knot you any day, little omega. I don’t go for the _reaaally_ deranged ones. The Bat has some . . . different tastes, doesn’t he? I mean, he would have to.”

“What a dirty mind you’ve got, Vic. I meant that my life’s the Bat’s to take. Nobody else’s.”

“We all know by now that he doesn’t do that, to anyone. And if after all the shit you’ve pulled, he’s _still_ decided he’d rather fuck you than kill you, I don’t think he’s gonna suddenly change his mind.”

“Ah, well, then I guess I’ll just have to live forever.”

Jerome lets his fingers slip off the map right then, nails scraping the tabletop as the paper springs back into a curl. “Can I have the, err—” He giggles a little for no reason in particular. That second half of an Oxy tablet seems to have shot him off to Pluto. “—the really _biiiig_ gun, Mom?” He points to a forty four magnum (what over the top taste he’s developing).

“No.”

“I’ll kill ‘em all, though.”

“That’s my boy!” he singsongs. “But there’s this little thing called ‘recoil’. No, you’re gonna stay here and make nice with Gertie Gordon over there.” Said girl has her face all pinched up like she’s sucking on a lemon as she grips her youngest brother’s hand, watching the adopted one stuff a variety of knives in his clothes and shove a clip into a handgun. (No expression can hide the smell of distressed, terrified omega gushing off her in waves.)

“Try not to charm her too much. And—” Out of the corner of his eye, he shoots a look at Cobblepot where he’s getting engrossed in discussing a variety of the nitty gritty details of things like logistics and ventilation shafts with Zsasz. As though so much minute planning is really needed for taking over an _insane asylum_ —the job was already ninety percent done before they even began. They’re just restoring the natural state, the order of things that the guards hold back by attrition every single day, because they can never change it, never _win_.

He lowers his voice. “And maybe put a little energy into, ah, avoiding her brother Jimmy. Between you and me, I think there’s something j _us_ t not right in his head.”

“Isn’t Alfred going to be here with us?” asks Jeremiah.

“I really do think I should stay with the children—” Jeeves finally pipes up, shifting his hand from Bruce’s shoulder to Jeremiah’s as the boy wiggles in next to his brother and wraps his arms around his chest. (Jerome huffs.)

“Now, you know you can’t do that, Al. You’re just too good of a shot!” He skips off a few feet then, around the corner of a rack so tall he has to tilt his head all the way back to see the machine guns polished and glinting at the top of it. He hmms in approval, runs his fingers over barrels and grips to see which one feels _just right_.

“And,” he continues, as soon as Jeeves follows him, “I think we both know Batsy never would’ve keyed his belfry to open for _me_. What is it, an eye scanner? Fingerprints?”

“Full body.”

“Ooh, _Loo-see-ish_ —” He says the name in that prissy way Jeeves always does. “—has been really cracking the whip down at R&D.”

“You shouldn’t know about any of it in the first place.”

“ _Alfred_ ,” he says in mock horror. “We can’t discuss how Mommy gets secrets out of Daddy in front of the _children_!” He winks, and smacks his lips.

Of course, he gets most of his information through far more prosaic means than that. Jeeves obviously knows it, too, but doesn’t risk pushing it. He purses his lips in very British irritation, watches as Joker plucks one gun from the shelf (handgun with burst capabilities, always useful, but—), then another (a sawed-off, great punch to that one—)

“Master Bruce wouldn’t want this.”

“Yeah, Bruce wouldn’t want a lot of things. Like, ah, the current state of this city. Or his kids not having food. Or his house being burnt down. Again. And yes, I am planning to kill a _lot_ of people, but that’s the beauty of me and Batsy, Jeeves—I can do the things he can’t. The things that, sometimes, _need_ to be done. I can make it so that he doesn’t have to. Though, Bane—I _am_ gonna take a page out of Bruce’s book with him. I’m only gonna make him _wish_ he was dead.”

Joker slips closer to him, nearly tickles the tip of the butler's nose with his own. “So the question is, what do _you_ want, Alfred? Before—before Bruce grew up and got around to transmitting all his little nonlethal ideals through the mansion like a bad disease, what did you want to do to Joe Chill, when you heard how Thomas and Martha died like rats in an alley?”

Jeeves lets go of the kids. A hand slips over his, tugs the semiautomatic out of his hold. He rasps in Joker's ear. “I wanted him to _burn_.”

.

Most days, Harley counts the beetles. They’re all over everything, worked into the metal of the railings, the molding on the walls, the tiles in the ceiling. (Very definitely beetles, not roaches—no, they’ve got enough live ones of those. Maybe that’s why, as a motif, Amadeus Arkham went with a species that she isn’t sure exists in New Jersey—he was just _so. fucking. tired._ of the cockroaches. Or he was just nuts.)

She got a book from the library about how Cyrus Pinkney Wayne built the place after Arkham told him some sob story about his crazy mother. It didn’t mention the beetles.

Other days, Harley makes some progress on her dissertation. She’s writing it on the Bat and the spike of bizarre crime that overtook the mafia presence in Gotham around the time he showed up. (She just can’t wait to add that PhD to the end of her name alongside the MD; it’s been such a long time coming, what with how busy she’s been the last few years.)

Sometimes, when the alpha guards are watching, she sticks out her tongue and laves at the bars of her cell, making eye contact with each of them in turn. It’s fun to see which ones are disgusted and which ones aren’t.

She never fucks any of them, though. The most she does is sometimes lead Tommy Schiff off to a corner of the rec room when the male and female omega patients aren’t being separated with the legally required vigorousness and let him fuck her. (Depending on how cooperative he’s been about his meds, he occasionally even appreciates what’s going on.)

Omega males have generally very low fertility as the _dominant partner_ , so to speak, so Harley’s not overly worried about anything coming of it—but then again, they’re both so devoted to the boss, wouldn’t it just be great to give the two little Js a harlequin of their own?

Harley drinks watery, terrible tea. Harley reads trashy romance novels from the library. Harley chats with the girl in the next cell. Harley watches as the guards start carrying more guns and whispering furiously between themselves in corners.

Harley _counts, counts, counts_ beetles.

Until one day, a note falls out of her fresh laundry.

It’s written in purple ink, and her heart skips a breathless beat at the sight of the boss’s handwriting.

_Have fun!_

_-PS: Need codes from Warden Idiot or Assistant Idiot._

Harley smiles. And loses count.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So not much happens this chapter except . . . setup. This whole section surrounding Arkham is turning out way longer than I intended and we haven't even gotten to what's going on with Bane yet. I mean, Arkham's a super interesting place, though. Most of the backstory surrounding it and the early Wayne/Cobblepot family comes from the various Arkham games.
> 
> There are various vague references to various incarnations of the Batman mythos throughout here, such as Joker asking Zsasz what he'd do with a tally mark with no murder to match it--the Joker actually does that to him in the Telltale game, which I think is a really underrated Batman game.
> 
> But hey, Joker's going steadily downhill and he's not going to get any better until Bruce gets back. Poor Gotham.
> 
> Why's Harley banging Thomas Schiff? I dunno. They both just seem like nearly equally fanatical followers of Joker and I love me some crack ships.
> 
> Chapter title is from the song "Sail" by AWOLNATION.
> 
> Thanks so much for the kudos and comments!


	3. my one and only (you)

Jeeves stands there for a full body scan, and the door to the Arkham Island Batcave beeps pleasantly and slides open.

“What the—how is this a _thing_?” Penguin seethes. He files in ahead of Zsasz, teeth clenched behind tightly pinched lips as his eyes go over every inch of the place from one side to the other. It’s not much to look at—some industrial catwalks suspended above a sheer drop, one of the type that’s so deep the bottom just looks kind of foggy and nondescript. There are plenty of storage crates, just like Zsasz had guessed, though most of them unfortunately have equipment that’s not his Brucie’s oh-so-beloved batarangs.

It’s pretty barren other than that, even scarce on bats. (And it’s really not as homey as the main cave, is it, without all that bat shit?) But the focal point of the room, where all the catwalks come together, is the important thing—the replica Batcomputer.

(Joker’s always found that _really_ fucking funny, even more than _batarang._ _Bat_ computer. How could a man be so perfect?)

(Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Joker dreamt him up and now he’s gone because he was never there.)

“Does it make you wonder, hmm? Just what else the Bat has? Waiting to be used against little. old. you?”

Penguin takes a deep breath, visibly calms that screeching harpy battling to well up under his skin. “He’s kind of, oh, how shall I put this? _Compromised_ now, isn’t he?” He shoots the briefest of pointed glances back at the small army of thugs and gangbangers and scum still coming in off the boat. “Not to pretend that any of them are _intelligent_ —” He nearly huffs a laugh at the thought. “—but even if they don’t know the Batman’s . . . actual name, they’ve seen behind a wall of misinformation they were never supposed to even _think_ about. If he ever comes back, he’s not such a creature anymore, is he? Just a man, who works out of a sad little cave. Are you scared of _just a man_ , Joker?”

“No. But then again, I’m just a man. Just a little omega, even. And plenty of people are scared of me.”

“But his trick’s getting old. We all know by now Batman doesn’t kill.”

“But I do. So maybe I’ll just have to kill everyone in this room. Right down to Gary over there—can’t have him blabbing.”

“Not if I kill you first.”

“You can try. But I’m a faith—”

“A faithful omega, right. I heard. You have some kind of snuff fantasy about Batman wrapping his hands around your neck and wringing the life out of you. We should be so lucky. But you offered Bane the same thing, didn’t you?”

Joker really does come _very_ close to laughing at that. The first time in a while. “ _Flirtation_. Bane would never have actually done it. He’s a sadist, after all. He’s torturing a whole city and taking _real_ fun in it, however much he dresses it up in his grand terrorist-cult rhetoric. How could he resist doing the same to me?”

“ _Joker_ ,” Jeeves says then, the word a bit awkward on his tongue. Honestly, he doesn’t address him by name very much, mainly because he hates his guts. He also, in his all-encompassing British propriety, doesn’t think an alias is appropriate to use in front of the children—so if he must, he uses _John_ , as in “Doe”.

(Joker finds that amusing for several reasons.)

But they’re all business now, no kiddies in sight, and Joker nods at him. “Right,” he says, and claps his hands a few times, drawing the attention of the blinking herd. “So, ah, boys, I know that depending on your, ah, specific incarceration histories, some of you may have some _issues_ with a particular guard here and there. And I _rrrreespect_ that, I really do. But keep in mind that Sharp and Strange, they’re—”

“Strange is mine,” Penguin bites out. It doesn’t seem like some last second thought, either—he was prepared for the mention of the name. And he seems so _vicious_ , foaming at his bit. (It makes Joker kind of excited.)

“The staff’s free game except for Strange and Sharp—and the ah, actual medical doctors, the ones in the infirmary. Got it?”

“Yeah, boss,” say his half. Penguin’s just kind of grunt in acknowledgment, uncertain and resentful.

Joker turns around and pops a little PSP looking thing out of its port beside the computer.

“And that is . . .?” little Oswald demands.

“Well, if Harley was efficient . . . it’s a codebreaker. Of course, the codes here do change pretty frequently, it’s supermax—so whatever my Bats had programmed in here before is useless by now. But I have some faith in my little, uh . . . idiot. She really can be brutal when it calls for it.”

And the codes do work on the locks.

.

Though, the riot has spread even further than Joker had anticipated in his wildest dreams, to the point that they start stumbling upon a few scattered groups of patients doing some _creative_ things to guards before they’re even out of the sewers attached to the cave system.

A few more lively guards are nearly as far in, and their expressions really are _funny_ when they see Joker and his little, ah, clown posse.

They’ve almost made it to the surface when, in the midst of the gunfire and the thud of bodies hitting the floor and the palpable, anxious disapproval from Jeeves, some metal container stored off in the corner of a subbasement is hit by a stray bullet.

Joker doesn’t think much of it at first, because there isn’t even any mist produced by it. He’s busy shooting at this guy and that, so much so that he doesn’t even immediately notice how _alone_ he suddenly is. He never really does, in fact.

He’s on a familiar street in the Narrows that’s bled seamlessly into his path and he’s very young and his scars are aching, and above him the night sky is pitch black and beautiful, knitted together and squirming with so, so many bats.

All of their shrieks are his name—no, not _that_ name; his _real_ name, _JokerJokerJokerJokerJokerJokerJoker_. But they’re beckoning him to open a door, his—no, his bitch mother’s apartment door, and Joker doesn’t want to but does anyway because maybe if Mommy is on the other side, he can kill her all over again.

But she isn’t. It’s just an office, pretentious and boring with furniture that caws pathetically about how rich the owner is. A hundred thousand million little beetles scurry around in all of it, beneath leather and over wood and even up walls and across windows, until it’s all just one moving, indistinguishable mass.

The only clean thing is the gramophone crackling in the corner. _My family’s blood ran through the heart of Gotham_ , it says with the voice of an old, drawn, bitter man. _We were doctors, politicians, and teachers; we have been the organ cleaning the arterial filth from the city. We have been its servants giving all to protect it. **And still it has chosen to hurt us.**_

But that voice warps and fades away into the brick and the beetles just like the rest of Amadeus Arkham did, and welling up from his putrefying flesh comes Joker’s own voice set to the slow flow of a song.

_Only you can make this world seem right. Only you can make this darkness bright. Only you and you alone can thrill me like you do and fill my heart with love. for. only. you._

The beetles all eat each other and behind them is an alley plastered with rotting posters and littered with bouncing pearls and blood and dead, maggoty bats, and the faint notes from the open theater door are still that song, still his voice. But that’s off in a distant place, safe and innocent and abandoned, beyond the reach of little Bruce as he weeps there on his knees in the midst of the filth.

Except it’s not _his_ Bruce—it’s the other one, the Bruce made _from_ him, that Joker assembled himself bit by bit, agonizingly crafted in his father’s image like a doll in the dark, veiny pit in his abdomen.

He’s crying and crying and part of Joker wants to hit him like his own mother would’ve, right across the mouth to shut him up, but this is a piece of _the Bat_. So instead he reaches out to touch, caress, maybe claw until he’s torn out everything of himself and all that’s left is _him_.

But by the time his fingers brush skin, the face he’s touching is his own. There’s a him that’s lying in the bed he killed his mother in, and looming over him on either side are Jerome and Jeremiah. And that him smiles as Jerome raises a knife to his neck, but it’s only when Jeremiah has swatted him away and covered his face with a pillow that the laughter starts. It continues, muffled, until the jerks and convulsions set in, and Joker finds he can’t breathe, either.

Jerome twirls his knife and takes in his expression and smiles at him and asks, “Why so serious?”

Then all at once Joker’s falling. Down and down and down, all his blood in his head, towards a void that eats all. A pit where men are thrown to suffer and die. And sometimes it gives something back, but not this time.

No, he keeps falling, and on every side of him, the walls demand it of him over and over again: _Why so serious? Whysoserious? Whysoseriouswhysoseriouswhysoseriouswhysoseriouswhysoseriouswhysoserious_

(The joke is that he _knows_ why.)

The stop comes all at once, but he doesn’t die. Or maybe he does, and doesn’t notice. Maybe he already had a while ago.

He lies there unmoving, still listening to that song.

_Only you can make this change in me. For it’s true, you are my destiny. When you hold my hand, I understand the magic that you do. You are my dream come true._

_My_

_one_

_and_

_only_

_you_

Bane laughs, somewhere close to him. He lifts his head up and finds him behind a window, head tilted like the dog he’d accused Joker of being. And Joker can’t say that of all he’s done before, any of it had been based on hate—just the opposite, really, all of it sewn through with indifference. Disregard. Amusement. _Love_.

But now he _hates_ , utterly loathes to a point that it _nauseates_ , sends chills to his extremities and heat to his chest, enough to hollow him from the inside out.

And it’s _unbearable_ to have that glass separating them. So he lunges against it and breaks it with his bare hands.

Then he’s on Bane and hitting and clawing and _strangling_ and banging his head against the floor until he hears something crack. And all the while goes the song, _the song_ —

my

one

and

only

you

“ _Please_ ,” comes a pathetic squeal, in a voice that’s all wrong.

And that’s about the time the music stops. Joker swallows sour bile and realizes the body under him is nowhere near Bane’s size.

He blinks. Sweat is cooling on his skin and everything seems oddly _fuzzy_ at the edges, but Quincy Sharp’s face swims into view, clear enough in spite of the phantom beetles that scurry across it.

(The vertigo and the shivering and the pounding heart aren’t unfamiliar to Joker, even though it’s nearly been ten years.)

(Has it _really_ been less than a decade since _that night_? It seems so much longer. But also so, so very short.)

He picks up a sizable fragment of glass from the ground beside them; studies it as his own blood slides down it from one of the deep cuts in his hands to drip-drip-drip to the floor.

He sticks it in Sharp’s mouth and asks him, “Did I ever tell you how I got these scars?”

“Multiple times,” he manages to drool.

“Yeah? What was the last one? Ah, never mind. Even _you_ have to have realized by now none of them were true. So d’ya want to hear a new one, even though you may find it . . . dis _appoint_ ing? _I_ don’t _exactly_ know how I got ‘em. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell _you_ , or anyone else. Except . . .” He hesitates, sawing the glass minutely against the edge of Sharp's mouth. “Have you ever met someone who . . . you just _know_ is what every—every breath you’ve ever taken since the first time air hit your lungs has been _for_? That every word you’ve spoken, every pain and misery and experience you’ve ever had, has just been _molding_ you into a . . . a _half_? And then finally the moment comes when the gaping _emptiness_ is filled and you’re _complete_. You have _meaning_.”

Joker shifts atop him, pressing down harder on his chest. “No. Of course you wouldn’t know. I guess you’re lucky, in your own little, pathetic way. You’ll never have to know what it really is to _lose_ the one thing that makes you . . . _you_. You’ll never know what that grief is like.”

He shrugs. (All he can manage is a scowl.) “Oh well.”

“No, Joker, ple—!” Sharp starts to scream, but it dies off into a useless, bloody gurgle. Joker leaves the glass stuck in his head.

“Heeeyyy, Mistah J.,” comes a wheedling voice from the doorway. “Great to see you! I didn’t wanna interrupt whatcha had going on there, but ah, Penguin looks to be getting ready to do some kinda freaky shit to Strange. Y’okay with that or you want him alive?”

“He can do whatever he wants with him,” he says, idly pulling more glass out of his hands. “In fact, I wanna see it.”

.

And little Oswald doesn’t disappoint.

“Our deal,” Strange says, trying to draw his usual air of stern, arrogant alpha authority around himself. It doesn’t _quite_ work, given he’s inching backwards along the floor, unable to keep his eyes off the umbrella Penguin’s leisurely twirling in his hand.

“Uh-huh,” he says. “That’s the thing. All the information and resources unique to Arkham that you could provide me with . . . only mattered when there _was_ an Arkham. Now you’re just the _son of a bitch_ who nearly convinced me I was _dirty_ and _crazy_ and _wrong_ and you don’t have anything left to _make it up to me_.”

“The Batman,” he pleads, verging on hysterical now. And ooh, is his face _ever_ getting paler as his eyeballs follow the movement of that umbrella. “I figured it out, I _know_ his identity—”

Penguin just smiles. “So do I.”

And as for what happens next—well. Joker hadn’t ever once imagined the little birdy could be so delightfully creative.

.

Jeeves brings the kids to join Joker in the entrance hall of Arkham Mansion just as some of the boys are clearing away the last of the bodies. He walks backwards through the room, long as a football field, taking in Cyrus Wayne’s melodramatic architecture until his back hits the base of the Amadeus Arkham statue that towers over them all.

“Well,” he says. “It doesn’t have that certain _je ne sais quoi_ of home, but it’ll do. You wanna scrounge up some dinner, Al?”

Jeeves nods sharply, even though his face is wan and sweaty and his hands are trembling. (Looks like Joker wasn’t the only one hit with Crane’s little surprise.)

Joker doesn’t stick around to share in the meal, as he’s still not hungry. Instead he walks out into the night, the slightest bounce in his stride as he makes his way across Arkham East. He steps over the occasional body, dodges some of the _really_ crazy escapees that charge incoherently at anything that crosses their paths, their straitjacket straps flapping. The guys that have commandeered the guard towers put them down as soon as they stray into their crosshairs.

A chilly wind blows through Arkham North, unseasonal, but that’s nothing new. Arkham Island is always cold. Something about the air off the water, supposedly, but Joker’s never thought that’s quite right.

Harley’s manning the entrance of the Intensive Treatment building, sipping tea between each order barked at the grunts. Joker ignores her greeting, already tired of what a simpering, codependent puppy she is, and taps on the locked elevator doors.

Harley releases the lock with the turn of a key, and Joker boards and closes the doors in her face. He selects one particular subbasement, frowning at the blood he leaves on the button.

Eventually, he steps out into Patient Belongings, a dingy warehouse of rows and rows of plastic bins tinged sickly yellow by florescent lights that were probably last updated in the ‘50s. It all reeks of wet concrete and mold.

It’s all in—vague—alphabetical order, so Joker first checks the D section, for “Doe”. And there’s an overwhelming amount of the sad remnants of the lives of many, many Gothamites whose families didn’t give enough of a shit to claim them in the loony bin, but nothing of Joker’s. So he sidles on over to J.

It takes a bit of digging, but finally he finds them, carelessly wrapped up in a clear plastic bag in a bin labeled, “Doe, John, alias “Joker”’.

His watch is gone, of course, and his cufflinks, but what’s really important is all still there, if a little motheaten. (Or was it rats?)

The purple gloves slip over his hands like a second skin, the blood flow slowing as it oozes across the lining. He slowly curls his hands into fists a few times, licking his scars at the creak of old leather and the pain.

He strips out of what he’s wearing and leaves it on the floor in a bloody, slightly singed ball. Then something stirs just beneath his skin as he goes through the familiar motions of _shirt_ , _pants_ , _tie_ , _waistcoat_. Even his shoes are there, the socks balled up in the fronts, and he can’t help but wiggle his toes in them when he gets them on.

Last is the overcoat, and as it slides into place across his shoulders, he almost feels like dancing.

But no. That’s tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joker actually does sing "Only You" in the credits of one of the Arkham games, though I don't remember which one. And Arkham's little rant on the gramophone is an audio file that can be found in the first game.
> 
> I always thought that the Joker's worst fear would be Batman dying, so he's kind of living it right now.
> 
> Maybe we'll finallyyyyy get to Bane again in the next chapter.
> 
> The chapter title is, of course, from the "Only You" song, which was apparently first done by a group called The Platters, though honestly I'm only really familiar with it due to its use in Far Cry 5.
> 
> Thanks for the kudos and comments!!


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